The present invention relates to the electrical, electronic and computer arts, and, more particularly, to cloud computing and the like.
Maintaining continuity of information technology (IT) operations despite the occurrence of disasters is critical for many businesses. The disasters may be natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes, or man-made disasters such as computer-based attacks or power outages. Disaster recovery (DR) refers to the ability to recover from outages caused by disasters. A number of industries (e.g., financial institutions and health care providers in the United States) are bound by law to recover from IT outages caused by disasters within specified time intervals. With the increasing popularity of cloud platforms to host business applications, DR has become an important service offered by providers of enterprise-class cloud systems such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Accordingly, startup or modification of a large number of machines in parallel within a very short time is required in certain cases; for example, cloud-scale disaster recovery requires a short administration time objective.